Vigil
George Saunders, Bloomsbury, £18.99
 

FOLLOWING on from his 2017 Booker Prize win with Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders wields the Buddha juju once again. 

This time on hapless oil baron KJ Boone, a dwarfism-motivated insatiable capitalist sadly finishing his days at the mercy of a death doula, Jill “Doll” Blaine (Blame?) in a beige skirt, spirited from Pennsylvania (where she was blown up by a car bomb).

There to comfort during the passings of the barely living — where to is not made clear — numerous dead souls assemble themselves (“we were hearing the thrashing sound one of our ilk will sometimes make as it struggles itself into being”) to walk through walls, fly through roofs, ceilings, anything, in order to prepare Americans for the great shuffle off.

These “ilk” provide a kind of personal valeting service, with a little bit of moral upbraiding added, so that the dying monster may be reminded of his role in poisoning a planet and annihilating everything on it.

There are some parts that move: a scene in which extinct birds swoop into the death chamber and are seen in the gradated, miraculous splendour of evolutionary design. “Lost forever,” says another of the “ilk.” He is the Frenchman who invented the engine: “It poisons, Madame, I did not know it then. I know it now.” His point is undermined by the cod French expressions peppering his sentences — “Quelle horreur!” — as humour.

Much in the style of Mairtin O’Cadhan’s 1940s classic novel, The Dirty Dust, the voices of the dead proliferate among the barely defined living. But O’Cadhan’s work is scurrilous and biting, while Saunders’ is milk-teeth satire.

Well-intentioned (Saunders’ biography notes that he worked in oil exploration in the 1980s) but superficial and tonally complacent, the book actually sustains a sense of US exceptionalism. The skewed logic of mainstream religious discourse, never questioned, underpins this book. “For this was the work our great God in Heaven had given me,” Jill states early on. To comfort as the monstrous ego hits the void.

Saunders’ Disneyfied take on death bobs on the tide of US religious capitalism. The soft-in-the-head rationale of Pete Hegseth’s hardcore righteousness-slaughter is not that far away — only through the walls, the ceiling, the roof, zut alors.